Consistency Makes King Queen of Links

It’s no secret golf is facing an identity crisis. A different winner every week, relays of faceless college kids who have not yet learned how tough a game it is, taking over on the tour with all these seagoing, no-brainer putts and miracle shots out of trees.

The game looks in vain for a star. It waits for one to crash out of a pack that has become about as easy to pick an individual out of as a crowd shot.

There used to be readily identifiable faces. Swings. Players whose accomplishments stood alone, who were larger than life, golfers whose names made crossword puzzles, cereal boxes, who had their own lines of golf clubs. But the sport has become more a lottery than a game.

Except for this one player who seems to be coasting quietly along, winning a tournament or two a year, piling up recognition points, appearing on TV cameras with some regularity.

This player doesn’t attack the course the way Arnold Palmer did. The strategy is to romance it, not wake it up. Go for the fat part of the green, play around trouble, take the percentage shot rather than the longshot.

Tom Kite? Who said anything about Tom Kite? We’re talking Betsy King here. It’s not only men’s golf that is suffering from an overdose of anonymity but the women’s game as well.

Men’s golf used to have Hogan, Snead, Nicklaus, Palmer, Trevino; and even earlier, Jones, Sarazen and Hagen.

Well, women’s golf used to have Babe Zaharias, Patty Berg, Glenna Collett Vare, Louise Suggs, Mickey Wright. Now, it seems to have a whole bunch of women named Penny, a few Lynns and Amys and Pattys--but the only player the public will recognize on sight is Nancy Lopez. They all seem to have gone to Furman, and they all play the game like a card player who keeps hoping for a pair of aces but keeps turning over treys.

Betsy King stands out because she has discovered how to a) make money and b) win. Since 1984, Betsy has hit the winner’s circle 16 times. Not even Nancy Lopez can match that gaudy streak. In that string, she has won $1,623,719. She has already won twice this year, beating Lopez by six shots in the year’s opening tournament in Jamaica and shooting a 14-under-par to beat Jane Geddes in Hawaii.

Betsy is not surprised. She thinks she has the best two instruction books in the world--the Old and New Testament. They don’t tell you how to hit a wood shot over water. But they tell you what to do when the shot doesn’t come off. Smile. And go on to the next one.

Betsy does not entirely rely on Scriptures for her birdies. She has her guru, as do most women on the LPGA tour. Hers is the taskmaster, Ed Oldfield, who is of the old school who believes the real secret of golf is hard work.

In grade school, Betsy King was about as unlikely a candidate for future stardom as ever picked up a nine iron. Never mind the braces on the teeth, the skinny legs. The Coke bottle glasses made it appear as if the only way she could read a break on a green was by Braille. Her eyesight varied from 20/200 to 20/Terrible. She used to play golf in her native Pennsylvania with a brother who became an outstanding amateur player and, briefly, a pro, and then a lawyer.

Golf was an important outlet for a young girl who was shy, bespectacled, very apt to blush. Some girls take to reading Charlotte Bronte in those circumstances. Betsy took to reading greens. She got good enough to become the low amateur (and eighth overall) in the 1976 U.S. Women’s Open. At a prom, she might have been a wallflower. On a golf course, she was a belle of the ball.

Soft contact lenses only made Betsy King better. A chronic tinkerer with her swing, she pieced together one which other members of the tour say is as compact and glitch-proof as, say, Gene Littler’s. Betsy is not so sure. “I take a swipe at it,” she insists. “I’m a striker of the ball, not a picture swinger.”

Whatever she is, it works. For seven years, she wore out driving-range tees while her game seesawed to where she just about broke even on the tour. Once the log jam broke, Betsy was one of the ones to beat week-in and week-out. She was as steady as a heartbeat, won two to four tournaments every year.

Her parents sent her to Furman because South Carolina seemed just far enough from the fleshpots of Philadelphia for a young woman, but Betsy was hardly the disco type anyway. Golf was her only true love. A green was the only dance floor she wanted to shine on.

The rap against women players is they are inconsistent. Betsy is so consistent it makes people sick.

She plays position golf. She doesn’t play that hit-it-find-it-and-go-hit-it-again game. They used to say Hogan had three fairways, right, middle and left. The rest of the world saw one. Betsy’s game is not refined to the point she sees three corridors to every green, but she does not close her eyes and swing, either. “I try to think of the next shot,” she says.

It doesn’t always make for birdie-binges. But it pays the rent.

Consistency looked as if it were going to have a bad week down here at the Nabisco Dinah Shore as Betsy opened with an un-Kingly 73-75 or four-over-par. But, order was restored in the Kingdom Saturday as she shot the day’s low round--68--and vaulted over several players in the treacherous winds that raked the Mission Hills course. She may not win but she will, as usual, be in the photo. At least, women’s golf may have found its King--in name as well as in deed.